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User blog:Jamesster.LEGO/Make up your mind, LEGO
As I type this I'm in the car, driving across Middle of Nowhere, Arizona. Not a whole lot to see, unless you find counting how many dirt devils you can spot as a fun pastime. But anyways, on to the topic of this blog post. No, I'm not writing this on the wiki itself, I'm writing it in Notepad, I'll paste it into a wiki blog post when we get to the hotel in 1-2 hours. But that's beside the point. The topic of this blog post is the Spider Bo-, uh, Maelstrom Sp-, uh, Spider Queen. If you've seen the recent news article you'll know what I'm talking about. With the free trial soon approaching, LEGO has announced that the Venture Explorer and Avant Gardens are getting a revamp, being polished more to impress the new players more and hopefully make them want to purchase the full game more. And, from what we've heard so far, the biggest change is going to be the addition of the battle against the Spider Queen. Now, a while back, PAH and I had a discussion about how the battle might work. Now, as I don't have internet access besides my phone at the moment (which has trouble logging in to Wikia), and I think a lot of the comments and posts on the subject got deleted anyways, I'm just going by memory here. But from what I remember, here's what we were saying: PAH was suggesting that the Spider Queen would be battled directly in Avant Gardens. From what I remember, his theory started with the Spider Queen model in Avant Gardens that can be seen out of bounds. From there, he came to the conclusion that the Spider Queen would be fought in a cavern in Avant Gardens itself, the cave being where the out of bounds areas are now. My theory was that, after getting the Maelstrom Helmet and passing the fog, you would be given the option to enter an instance much like the Dragon Battle instance in Forbidden Valley. From there, I thought it would act like a sub-world, with at least one NPC and the Spider Queen to fight. My theory was based on video footage taken from the "LEGO Universe "Epic" Trailer " video. This trailer shows two scenes presumably from the Spider Cave; the first scene showing two minifigures attacking the Spider Queen in an unknown cavern, the second scene showing a minifigure interacting with a mission giver NPC in a similar looking cavern. This, plus the fact that the out of bounds terrain where PAH suggested the Spider Cave might be placed was above ground (even higher then the Paradox Research Facility and Maelstrom Mine), led me to completely dismiss PAH's theory, which then sparked a long drawn-out argument. I thought that LEGO wouldn't take the time or effort to completely re-do the Spider Cave seen in the trailer, or bother to modify the AG terrain to make it fit. And back then, there was no reason for them to. But since that argument took place, a reason has been added: The free trial. In an effort to make the free version of LU more interesting, the developers have moved the actual battle against the Spider Queen to, of all places... Block Yard. According to the recently published news article, after passing the Maelstrom Fog in the mine area, players will decend down a cave, at the end of which will be a repaired launch pad to Block Yard, where the Maelstrom Spider will await. This is where things get a bit weird. Firstly, there's a very good chance that the Spider Cave has been redesigned for the free trial. The original Spider Cave, going by the video clips from the trailer, had the Spider Queen actually being fought in the cave itself, the cave being an instance/mini world like Return to the Venture Explorer or the Battle of Nimbus Station. However, as the Spider Queen is now fought in Block Yard, that means that the space where the Spider Boss was once fought in the cave would then be empty or unused. Seeing as the devs wouldn't just leave an empty battle arena in the cave, chances are they've either filled it with something else or redesigned the cave. And if they're redesigning the cave, I see no reason not to put it directly in Avant Gardens (albeit with heavy terrain modifications). But if they're going to do that, I don't know. It mainly depends on the size of the cave. Judging by some videos that Kelvin once uploaded, that showed the terrain for the original Spider Cave (the same terrain seen in the "Epic Trailer" I might add), the Spider Cave is pretty darn huge. But as we don't even know if that's the design that's going to be released, we can't say how big or small it's going to be. Another question would be where does the Spider Cave exit? Seeing as there's a rocket pad at the end of the cave that leads to Block Yard/the Spider Queen instance, it must be somewhat out in the open, or at least have a hole in the roof for rockets to pass through. But then what about the normal Block Yard launch pad? Will that be replaced? Judging by the fact that the Spider Queen is fought on Block Yard, I'm assuming that once it's defeated, the property will be cleaned of Maelstrom (like other properties once you've claimed them), allowing for the free trial members to then build on the prop. That would imply that the Block Yard would take place in the same instance as the Spider Queen battle, unless the devs want an awkward load screen between defeating the Spider Boss and building on Block Yard. Yet in the files for the current game patch, there's two scenes/instances related to the Spider Cave/boss battle, "maps\01_Live_Maps\Avant_Gardens\Spider_Cave\nd_ag_spider_cave.raw" and "maps\01_Live_Maps\Avant_Gardens\Spider_Cave\nd_ag_spider_cave_boss.raw" (there's a .raw file for every scene in the game where the game has to have a loading screen to switch to it, for instance, for the game to switch from Nimbus Station to the LEGO Club, it has to go from "nd_nimbus_station.raw" to "nd_lego_club.raw"). Block Yard also has it's own .raw file, "maps\01_Live_Maps\Avant_Gardens\Property\Small\nd_ag_property_small.raw". So how is this revamped Spider Queen battle going to work? Is the Spider Cave still a separate mini world/instance like it was originally planned to be? Heck if I know, but we'll be finding out soon. Also, one other thing: How would the Spider Queen manage to fix the launch pad in the Spider Cave to go to Block Yard, like the news article says? And how would it fit on a rocket? Isn't it a tad too big? Gah, this is what happens when LEGO tries to make a quick modification to the story without thinking it through, like the tombs in Forbidden Valley (if there were no minifigs on Crux besides the First Builders/Mythran before the four explores came to it, where did those tombs come from? Easy to explain in the Wonderland story, but didn't attapt too well to the Crux story). Meh, as long as we get a fun mini area out of all this mess I'm happy. Category:Blog posts